Where is Riverbend?

As you can see from clicking the following hot link, Baghdad Burning, in just one more month it will be two painful years since a woman who called herself "Riverbend" made her last post on her weblog.

Starting from the time that I first read her work, which must've been in 2003, "Baghdad Burning" was and still is my favorite weblog. In it she vividly portrayed what it was like to be an Iraqi after the GWBush administration sent an overpowering number of troops into her country and quickly made of it a shambles, from which Iraq still shows few signs of recovering, as far as I can see. She painted unforgettable word pictures not only of herself but also of her family members and of Iraqis in general as they coped with the steady descent into sheer catastrophe brought on by the invasion. Eventually the various personal outrages that she shared with the other Iraqis were even marked by what became a popular crime in Iraq, kidnapping. Some people grabbed one of her cousins, and he was returned only after her family had seriously strained itself financially by paying a big ransom.

I was also constantly struck by her determination and courage in sticking things out, when so many other Iraqis were choosing to leave by any means possible. But finally, after four years of the chaos, they decided that they had to leave, and they went to neighboring Syria, from which the October 22, 1007 was the last post she made, at a time when whether they would be able to stay there, too, was still very much up in the air.

The mention in the news today that something called Eid, which comes after the end of the Muslim celebration of Ramadan, is about to start. I remembered that Riverbend had made ofa big thing of Eid, a name that appealed to me and which I had never heard of and still don't recall what it was about, except that it was important.

I guess part of the mystique that bound me so closely to the idea of this woman was the mystique of her mystery that she kept wrapped so tightly and thickly around her, despite the way that she assaulted male Muslim attitudes by dressing in jeans and other revealing garb while against the tent-covered way in which they thought she should be dressed. Who was Riverbend? What was her real name? What did she look like? Her mastery of the American idiom was such that she must've spent a lot of time in the U.S., yet she never let loose one inkling as to whether or not she had, and whenever she mentioned the U.S., it was usually with scorn. What happened in Syria? Where is she now? Most importantly, is she still alive and well? I have yet to read any answers to all these questions.

I always thought that if Riverbend were to come to the U.S. she would end up being quite well off. She had a large number of admirers here, and for one thing a great movie could be made of her story, though in other places she also had detractors. Some thought she didn't exist but was just someone's extremely clever creation. Others also called her a Ba'athist, because she clearly preferred the world of the highly criminal Saddam Hussein to that of the equally crimiinal George W. Bush -- where Iraq was concerned. But that was only to be expected when you consider that as long as Saddam was around, at least things as basic as electricity, running water, and law and order were available all the time, instead of just the few hours a day after the bringing of "democracy."

I know that weblogging is an activity easily to be dropped and never to be resumed again, or at least only after a long interval, and I seriously hope that that is all it is, in Riverbend's case.